Various mechanisms exist for increasing platform boot efficiency, or decreasing boot time, have been implemented in existing systems.
Many vendors and users of platforms are concerned with the amount of time it takes to boot a platform. In this sense, booting comprises powering on the platform and proceeding to the point of getting a user login prompt or being able to run user applications. There are many standards associated with ensuring that platforms can run through the firmware path as quickly as possible. The time required to launch an operating system (OS) may vary based on the complexity of the OS. A typical desktop platform may take 7.5 seconds to boot to launch of the OS. The actual standards are driven by the industry as a whole. This is also evident in the server environment to accommodate highly available systems. The shorter the boot time, the more available the server will be after maintenance or crash. Faster boot times are extremely desirable in systems having a requirement to be highly available/reliable or in Internet cafés where systems are rebooted after each user's session. In addition, remote network boot can be extremely time intensive. The typical overhead associated with reading all the normal platform remote boot content from a server disk is usually between 20-300 seconds. Much of the overhead associated with the loading of the operating system (OS) has to do with the low data throughput of remote network attachment, and reading from a high latency low speed spigot on which the data resides (e.g. remote server).